posted Sept. 15. 2005
THE L. A. TIMES AND A KINDER, GREENER DWP?
AN "OPEN LETTER" TO
"ENVIRONMENTALIST" MARY NICHOLS AND TIMES PUBLISHER JEFFREY JOHNSON
When asked to name the writer on Southern California who had the greatest
influence in shaping my values, I pass over the more prominent names: John
Caughey, Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr and others. I grew up in the pre-WWII
Southland, and my literary hero was the latter-day muckraker, Morrow Mayo. I
was thirteen when I read his powerful environmental essay, "To See it Fall," a
now forgotten plea for preservation of the giant Sequoias. Shortly after that
I read his critical volume "Los Angeles," and I became forever a critic of the
city's destruction of Owens Valley.
But not everyone holds that view. Attached prominently to the Los Angeles
Times on Wednesday, Sept. 7, was a twelve page puff piece by the city's
Department of Water and Power, extolling the role of William Mulholland and
recounting the glory of DWP conservation and its greening of the environment.
Most striking was the blatant pat-on-the-back on page five, "Restoring the
Owens Valley."
The DWP would have you believe that it was their agency that originated and
implemented the three restoration projects mentioned on that page: lower
Owens River mitigation, Owens Lake dust mitigation and Owens River gorge
restoration. Nowhere is there an indication that DWP, at times dominated by
"environmentalists," including current board member Mary Nichols, fought those
efforts tooth and nail. Only fierce support for mitigation from those in the
Owens Valley, and sound decisions by state judges, forced the city to comply.
But it isn't just in recent years that the DWP has balked at conservation,
preservation and restoration. Its whole history is a long litany of abuse of
the land and residents east of the Sierra Nevada. A century ago the city
quietly acquired land titles and water rights in the Owens Valley, moved the
national forest boundary around to its liking, and diminished the flow in
Owens River, thereby drying up the lake.
Over the years it didn't really matter if "environmentalists" served on the
water board or not. In the 1920s the city's leading social reformer, John R.
Haynes, and fellow reformer Clarence Dykstra, later the provost at UCLA,
served on the board. But it was under them that many of the tragic episodes
took place.
Decades later, under Democratic mayor Tom Bradley, self-proclaimed
environmentalists controlled the DWP board. Mary Nichols, Mike Gage and
Dorothy Green were all leaders in various environmental groups. Yet they
continued to arouse the wrath of Owens Valley residents by their actions over
the next few years.
Actually the role of the five member board of directors of DWP is vastly
overrated. The real policy planning takes place at the staff level.
Attorneys, engineers and managers determine the course that DWP will follow.
Directors come and go, almost at will, but the staff remains.
DWP is an example of a self-directing bureaucracy. Even John Haynes took the
position that whatever LA did in the Owens Valley should not interfere with
the city's water supply. Having conceded that, Valley residents had little
room to negotiate with DWP.
In the 1980s and `90s "liberal" Democratic legislators from Los Angeles,
ostensibly friends of the environment, led an abortive effort to exempt the
city from regulations that would alleviate the dust problem on the lake. You
would never know that reading the DWP's advertising supplement in the Times.
And only a gubernatorial veto prevented the city from winning legislation that
would remove ground water pumping from state regulation.
The resident "environmentalist" on the current DWP board, Mary Nichols, should
have fought vigorously to prevent publication of that misleading supplement in
the Times. But nary a word in opposition reached the pages of the paper.
The Times is equally at fault, refusing to run this op-ed rebuttal, claiming
that it doesn't meet Times standards for quality, argument and timeliness. Nor
has the Times been forthcoming in explaining who paid for the supplement and
what the role of the paper was in preparing it.
No doubt the Times made money by publishing the supplement. Does that justify
silence regarding a reasonable rebuttal? Five years ago a scandal over a
Staples Center supplement brought down the publisher at the Times when
business considerations preempted editorial ethics. Has that happened again?
Morrow Mayo is out of sync with modern writers of Southern California history.
Rather than publish self-serving supplements, the Times would do its readers a
greater service by reprinting Mayo's "To See it Fall" and "The Rape of Owens
Valley."
[Ralph E. Shaffer, professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly Pomona, can be
reached at reshaffer@csupomona.edu]